Bays, Manford

ORAL HISTORY OF MANFORD BAYS
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
May 24, 2005
[Side A]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Mr. Bays, why don't we start out by you telling us when and why you first came to Oak Ridge, okay?
Mr. Bays: I lived in Fort Worth, Texas before I came here. My mother and father also, but my father and mother moved from Fort Worth to here.
Mr. Kolb: To Oak Ridge?
Mr. Bays: Yes, sometime in February, and –
Mr. Kolb: What year?
Mr. Bays: ’44. My father contacted me and wanted me to come up, so we came up here, and then I got a job here about two or three days later.
Mr. Kolb: Did your father work in the project too?
Mr. Bays: Yes he did. He worked at the Gaseous Diffusion Plant.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, and you got a job where?
Mr. Bays: In Y-12.
Mr. Kolb: In two days, you got a job?
Mr. Bays: Yep, they were really wanting you then.
Mr. Kolb: What kind of work did you start out doing?
Mr. Bays: Materials Department.
Mr. Kolb: Materials Department, at Y-12?
Mr. Bays: At Y-12.
Mr. Kolb: That was a big busy plant back then, wasn’t it?
Mr. Bays: Yeah, it was. It sure was. You know, I recall a person there that I haven’t seen anything about him in years: Dr. Conklin was the head of Y-12 at the time I went there. He was with Tennessee Eastman and came down from Kingsport to run the Y-12 plant.
Mr. Kolb: Is he still alive? Do you know?
Mr. Bays: I have no idea.
Mr. Kolb: You just don’t know.
Mr. Bays: No.
Mr. Kolb: I don’t know of him. I guess he left Oak Ridge some time ago.
Mr. Bays: Oh, when Eastman pulled out, he left Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, well let’s talk about your work experience in Y-12 then, during the wartime years. What did you do and how big was your group? Who did you work with? That kind of thing.
Mr. Bays: I started in the Storage Department as a stock keeper. Then I was a materials engineer, which included making a catalog of all the items in stock. Back at that time we had around fifty thousand dollars valued at somewhere around twenty million dollars. And then I moved up to a materials engineer and from there I was mailing supervisor in the Materials Department and I moved up later to the head of the Materials Department when I retired.
Mr. Kolb: How big a group was that back in the WORLD WAR II days?
Mr. Bays: At the time I left, there was around two hundred people in the Materials Department.
Mr. Kolb: Now, when you say ‘material,’ does that cover all the materials that Y-12 used?
Mr. Bays: Yeah, and the storage function.
Mr. Kolb: And storage?
Mr. Bays: Yeah, that’s right.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause what I’m thinking about, the fact that the silver was taken out of West Point and brought into Y-12 to help make the coils, right?
Mr. Bays: Right.
Mr. Kolb: Was that under part of your control too?
Mr. Bays: No, it was not.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mr. Bays: The mercury that was there was under my control.
Mr. Kolb: And I guess the uranium product would have been treated specially too.
Mr. Bays: No, that’s exactly right.
Mr. Kolb: That was special.
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: But everything else, that’s a huge amount of material.
Mr. Bays: It was. We had five or six warehouses and quite a job to keep up with it and to keep up with the progress of how to handle material and how to reorder it, which I was responsible for.
Mr. Kolb: What building or buildings did you work in?
Mr. Bays: 9720-5 was the last one. I started to work in 9720-1. Then from there I went to 9720-6, which was an Air Force hanger that had been prefabbed and they decided to move it to Y-12, and it looked just like a hanger. It’s still out there, I believe.
Mr. Kolb: It is?
Mr. Bays: Yes. And I’m sure people are still working at it. [After working in 9720-1], I moved there and then from there they built a new warehouse in 9720-5.
Mr. Kolb: I worked for a while in Y-12 back in the ’60’s and I don’t recall ever seeing that hanger. I worked in, they call it – everything was dash something. Dash three, I think. Anyway, I –
Mr. Bays: Was it 9201-3?
Mr. Kolb: Mhm.
Mr. Bays: Well I can tell you something else about that. At the time when I first came there, that was not known as 9201-3. It was 9201 alpha one the fifth.
Mr. Kolb: Alpha one the fifth.
Mr. Bays: One fifth.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, one fifth.
Mr. Bays: Yes. Why, I have no idea.
Mr. Kolb: The fraction, one fifth?
Mr. Bays: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve never heard that.
Mr. Bays: Then they put it in order with the other ones: dash one, dash two, and dash three. At the time I first came there, that’s what was on them. While I was there, there was really a big water break in this particular building.
Mr. Kolb: In that building?
Mr. Bays: Yes. In the high voltage cubicles, there was a ceramic water cooler system where water froze and kept the tubes that were sitting in them cool, and they started popping the ceramic parts, and the water flowed all the way down into the basement before they finally got it stopped.
Mr. Kolb: Ooh, that shorted out a lot of electricity I bet.
Mr. Bays: Oh, it did. It was a mess. And to clean it up too, can you imagine?
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I bet. But were there other buildings that had fractional names like that, like ‘one fifth’?
Mr. Bays: No, that’s the only one that I recall.
Mr. Kolb: But you don’t know why it was called that?
Mr. Bays: No sir, I don’t.
Mr. Kolb: Well, you and your wife lived in Oak Ridge when you came here.
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: What kind of housing did you –
Mr. Bays: We first moved into, down at 271 Vermont Avenue. I stayed there approximately a year and moved in –
Mr. Kolb: Well, what, what kind of housing was it?
Mr. Bays: It was an “E1”.
Mr. Kolb: “E1” apartment.
Mr. Bays: Right, then we moved to an “E2” at 213 [Vermont Avenue].
Mr. Kolb: Did you have any children then?
Mr. Bays: Yes, one daughter.
Mr. Kolb: One daughter.
Mr. Bays: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Did that help you get a house you think?
Mr. Bays: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, probably so, the fact you had a child, yeah. So that was Vermont, just down the street here.
Mr. Bays: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: How long did you live there?
Mr. Bays: About a year there.
Mr. Kolb: And then –
Mr. Bays: There was really an odd thing happened while I was there at 213. A guy knocked on the door one day, and he was with the Associated Press, I think, and they had just released the business about the spies that had come down from Kingsport.
Mr. Kolb: Spies?
Mr. Bays: Yes. Are you familiar with this?
Mr. Kolb: I’ve never heard this, I don’t know.
Mr. Bays: Okay.
Mr. Kolb: German spies?
Mr. Bays: No, I don’t know who they were, but unfortunately I moved into the apartment at 213 where this guy lived that was one of them and the guy went to talk –
Mr. Kolb: He was one of your neighbors?
Mr. Bays: No, he moved out and I moved right in.
Mr. Kolb: Oh I see, okay.
Mr. Bays: And they wanted to know if I knew anything about him and I didn’t, so it was something to remember.
Mr. Kolb: Well, tell me more about this spy story. I mean, I’ve never heard anything about this.
Mr. Bays: Oh, that was a really – and then there was involved a women and man and it – but the particular – and I cannot remember the guy’s name, but I do know he worked at the Ordinance at Kingsport and he came down here. A close friend of mine, I guess it was sometime after they arrested him, [said] that a guy named Walt Cameron, he’s dead now, was a close friend of this fellow and didn’t know anything. But for some years they questioned him very, very thoroughly to try to see if he had any information that would help them in the case.
Mr. Kolb: But who was this person spying for?
Mr. Bays: I say Russians, I’m sure.
Mr. Kolb: Russians, okay. I guess they were a bigger problem than the Nazis were at that time, and we didn’t know it then but, did we? It all came out later. But was this –
Mr. Bays: Oh, it was a big deal then, man oh man.
Mr. Kolb: And the Associated Press wrote this story up?
Mr. Bays: Oh yes, and there was a writer with them that came to the door and wanted to know what I knew. Of course I knew nothing about the situation.
Mr. Kolb: Did this come out in the local press at all?
Mr. Bays: It sure did, Knoxville papers and probably all over the country.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, Associated Press, I guess so. I’d never heard that, you see. So many things went on you just can’t believe. You just happened to be in that same apartment, that they were tracking you, whether you knew anything about them. So the FBI came and then questioned you?
Mr. Bays: No, no.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, just, just the press.
Mr. Bays: Just the pressman.
Mr. Kolb: Well, okay, you lived at Vermont and you went where after that?
Mr. Bays: I lived at 213 and 217 Vermont Avenue.
Mr. Kolb: Oh you just moved a few –
Mr. Bays: Blocks up the street now where the SunTrust Bank is now.
Mr. Kolb: Did you get a bigger place then?
Mr. Bays: Then I got a two-bedroom apartment. Then we moved here, where we’ve been ever since.
Mr. Kolb: And when did you move here?
Mr. Bays: I’d say about ’45, ’46, I believe.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, way back early.
Mr. Bays: Yeah it was in the early days.
Mr. Kolb: So this is what kind of house?
Mr. Bays: It’s an “A” house.
Mr. Kolb: “A” house. An “A”?
Mr. Bays: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: It’s a big “A”.
Mr. Bays: Well this part is all been added and a basement underneath us has been added.
Mr. Kolb: Okay but “A”s were a one-bedroom house, weren’t they?
Mr. Bays: No, they were always a two-bedroom. And “B” was two-bedroom and a “C” was three-bedroom.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, a two-bedroom, so this is all added here, where we’re sitting?
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So you’ve been right in this same neighborhood all these years.
Mr. Bays: All this time, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Well that’s amazing. Yeah, that’s interesting. And how many children did you have over –
Mr. Bays: One.
Mr. Kolb: You just had one child.
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: A daughter?
Mr. Bays: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, and she’s the one in Virginia.
Mr. Bays: Right.
Mr. Kolb: Right, okay. So what school did she go to?
Mr. Bays: Here, she started school here and graduated –
Mr. Kolb: In Pine Valley?
Mr. Bays: She sure did go to Pine Valley.
Mr. Kolb: My wife started teaching in Oak Ridge in Pine Valley in ’55.
Mr. Bays: She still has friends that she went to school with here and she visits them and they visit her. Real nice.
Mr. Kolb: What class of high school was she in, do you know about?
Mr. Bays: I’m guessing ’62.
Mr. Kolb: Somewhere in there.
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Early sixties. How was living in Oak Ridge back in the wartime days? Did you have enough food? Did you get enough?
Mr. Bays: I had really no problem along those lines that I recall at all.
Mr. Kolb: Of course things were rationed. You had to deal with –
Mr. Bays: Yes, you had to deal with that.
Mr. Kolb: Standing in lines and that sort of thing, yeah.
Mr. Bays: Gas was also rationed.
Mr. Kolb: Oh yeah, and nylons, people painted their legs.
Mr. Bays: And back in those days we had wood sidewalks. You remember them?
Mr. Kolb: The boardwalks.
Mr. Bays: Boardwalks. The Turnpike was on one side of me and Vermont Avenue on the other and at that time it was nothing but gravel and all the time during the day they would run trucks spraying water over this to keep the dust down, you may remember all that.
Mr. Kolb: No, I came in ’54, so everything was paved by then.
Mr. Bays: Oh, it was, okay.
Mr. Kolb: Of course you didn’t have to deal with as much mud since you had gravel.
Mr. Bays: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I guess some of the streets maybe weren’t quite treated but it was better than ’42 when everything was just mud.
Mr. Bays: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Well did you and your wife belong to any clubs or churches back then? What did you do for recreation?
Mr. Bays: Oh, this is a picture, 1969, December, the bowling team that I was on. And that was probably the most well-known fellow there.
Mr. Kolb: You’re…?
Mr. Bays: In this top one, right there.
Mr. Kolb: Did you bowl at the Oak Terrace?
Mr. Bays: No, at the old one. I mean that they’ve now got some kind of a – I don’t know what’s in it.
Mr. Kolb: Well there’s one up in Jackson Square, bowling.
Mr. Bays: There was then, and one at Grove Center.
Mr. Kolb: That’s the Oak Terrace, is that where?
Mr. Bays: Then when they closed it, I didn’t actually bowl in those two alleys anymore until they went to the one at Downtown.
Mr. Kolb: Oh there was one downtown?
Mr. Bays: Yeah, it’s –
Mr. Kolb: At Midtown?
Mr. Bays: No, right down next to the mall.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mr. Bays: I think there’s a DPI or something like that business.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, it was a recreation center building there then?
Mr. Bays: Mostly a bowling center.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, bowling, okay. It was all called Midtown back then, right?
Mr. Bays: No, Midtown was farther west than that.
Mr. Kolb: Further west. Well, okay, I know, I’ve seen pictures of that building. So who were these guys in this team here? Can you tell me who they are? Were they plant guys from Y-12?
Mr. Bays: This is actually a league, Y-12 League. This is Elmer Johnson, that’s George Reese, me, can’t remember that guy, that’s Harry Keene. Now I know, of this group, Harry is still living, Nelson Tibbets, I can’t remember his name, Teddy Peckman, can’t remember that guy’s name.
Mr. Kolb: So when did you start bowling with the league, was it during wartime or was it later?
Mr. Bays: Later.
Mr. Kolb: But bowling was real popular back –
Mr. Bays: Oh that was one of the big – and the softball was also very popular, ’cause the plant footed the bill for all that in those days. That made a big difference.
Mr. Kolb: Oh yeah, that’s right, prize money, and there were prizes and that sort of thing. Did your wife bowl too or just you?
Mr. Bays: No, just me.
Mr. Kolb: Did you belong to any –
Mr. Bays: Oh, I was in the Lions Club at one –
Mr. Kolb: You were? I'm a Lion. So you were in the Oak Ridge Lions Club?
Mr. Bays: Yes, I was in it back when they had the, I guess, nigger minstrels, ever heard that before?
Mr. Kolb: Nigger? Well you don’t use that word anymore, of course.
Mr. Bays: I know. That’s what they did then.
Mr. Kolb: Negro minstrels?
Mr. Bays: Negro minstrels. And what it was, I was one of the “end men,” they called them, and it was a show.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, well you played the part of a minstrel?
Mr. Bays: End man, yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I see.
Mr. Bays: Quite interesting.
Mr. Kolb: So you put on a show.
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: To raise money?
Mr. Bays: Yeah, to raise money for the Lions Club.
Mr. Kolb: Okay I’d never known that. I mean, I’ve heard of minstrel shows but not the fact that you – I’ll be darned.
Mr. Bays: Oh, I was trying to think if I could, yeah, Bob Gray. I don’t know whether you know him or not.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah I know Bob Gray.
Mr. Bays: Bob was one of the –
Mr. Kolb: He’s retired from the metallurgical, MC Division and I, you probably, well, Herb Diggs.
Mr. Bays: Yeah Herb was one of them at that time.
Mr. Kolb: Was he in there? And oh, there’s a lot of old Lions; that club is really old. But yeah, I’m trying to think of –
Mr. Bays: We used to get out and sell brooms.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, which they still do, brooms and mops and light bulbs.
Mr. Bays: Remember getting dog-bit one time up. I was walking down the street carrying the brooms and mops and all of a sudden a dog catches me behind. I didn’t even see it. It didn’t bark, and it scared me.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve had some close shaves that way, but I usually had a broom handy enough to swat them away. Okay, so were you a charter member of the club then?
Mr. Bays: No.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause I know it started back in the ’40s sometime during the World War II days.
Mr. Bays: No, I was not.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I’m in the Century Lions. They sponsored our club. We’re a noon club and they’re the evening club in town now. Well, did you belong to any churches in town?
Mr. Bays: No, well, yeah, went to United Church on the Hill.
Mr. Kolb: Chapel on the Hill?
Mr. Bays: Yep, sure did. I was also a Mason. I’m a 50-year member of the Masonic Lodge.
Mr. Kolb: Great, and so that Chapel on the Hill, was [that] when they had different denominations having [the] same –
Mr. Bays: Yes, at that time there was; several denominations used that one facility.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve been told that that was one of several chapels in town that was used that way. Is that right or not?
Mr. Bays: Well, the only way I can remember is all the church was used by several different denominations until they could build a church; that’s the way I saw it.
Mr. Kolb: But, I mean, were there other chapels built in Oak Ridge?
Mr. Bays: Oh, I don’t think so. I believe that was the first and only one at that time.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, of course there was probably one out in Happy Valley or K-25, I imagine.
Mr. Bays: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: But it was torn down real fast, too, when that went away.
Mr. Bays: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Okay. So you had this, every hour, a different set-up came in.
Mr. Bays: Yeah that’s right, real interesting, and I met a lot of good people then.
Mr. Kolb: Did you get to the Smokies or do hikes and that sort of thing back in those days?
Mr. Bays: No, we didn’t hike, but we would go up – and, by the way, at that time you had to have a pass to get into Oak Ridge, and if we were going to have company, we would have to arrange for them a pass at a certain gate. And so we went up to the Smokies several times, and when we had company we would always take them up there.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, real popular place. Remember the old, big hotel there? It was right on the corner where the road to Cosby takes off, Mountain something. They had a good dining room; that’s what I remember. I mean, I never stayed there, just went to their dining room; this was back in the ’50s, early ’60s.
Mr. Bays: I’ve got some notes here.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, let me just turn this –
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mr. Bays: We moved here May 1, 1944 from Fort Worth, Texas. I went to work at Y-12 the 6th day of May in 1944 in the Materials Department. Oh, Tennessee Eastman Company. When we were off for Christmas in the ’40s, nobody suspected it, but when we got back they were closing the plant down, when we got back from the holidays.
Mr. Kolb: What year was that?
Mr. Bays: I don’t remember that, sir.
Mr. Kolb: After the war ended?
Mr. Bays: Yeah I guess it was.
Mr. Kolb: Probably about ’47 or so.
Mr. Bays: Something like that.
Mr. Kolb: I think is when I remember closing one. Did you lose your job then?
Mr. Bays: No, I continued to work. Then about a year later, the supervisor of the department called me in. He said, “What’s your plans?” I said, “I’m just waiting for you to give my notice.” And he said, “How would you like to stay around for a month?” And I said, “Well that would be great ’cause I’m going back to Fort Worth and that will just delay my trip on me.” He said, “Well, I can’t promise you anything anymore.” So I stayed on then, and forty-seven years I’ve been in.
Mr. Kolb: Just worked out.
Mr. Bays: Yeah, worked out great.
Mr. Kolb: Fort Worth just had to do without you, right?
Mr. Bays: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: So you worked for forty-seven years?
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Wow, great.
Mr. Bays: And while I was there – I can’t remember the buildings, but they were administrative buildings ’cause I was at that time a materials engineer, and he was – are you familiar how you go into – I’ll call it the “central portal” at Y-12? You go down the hill and you hit a portal. Right on that hill there where the north – that portal was about three or four buildings, and when we come back to work shortly after Christmas, the buildings had burned and we had to sit around in the Cafeteria for some time until we could get back in the building and recover any records we had.
Mr. Kolb: Was that the building you worked in, you mean?
Mr. Bays: Yes, yes, we worked in one.
Mr. Kolb: Is that close to the Cafeteria building?
Mr. Bays: No it’s down farther west.
Mr. Kolb: Further west than there, okay.
Mr. Bays: No, East; I beg your pardon.
Mr. Kolb: East.
Mr. Bays: Yeah, do you know where the Biology Division is?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah.
Mr. Bays: Okay it’s just west of there on the hill. There’s nothing there now. There may be a concrete vault, brick vault that was used.
Mr. Kolb: Well you know where, what they used to call the Administration Building – I don’t know the number of it – it’s where all the bigwigs had their offices.
Mr. Bays: Yeah, 9704-2.
Mr. Kolb: Well, is that close to where you’re talking about?
Mr. Bays: No I’m talking east of there. In fact, if you looked at it now you couldn’t tell there’s ever been a building there.
Mr. Kolb: Well I used to go in that portal, and there used to be a small building, this building you called a “fish bowl,” and the reason it was called a fish bowl, because inside, it was all glass partitions. You could look down the whole building and see everything.
Mr. Bays: I think that was where Dr. Conklin’s office probably was ’cause it was adjoining.
Mr. Kolb: All office space. Is this the area you are talking about?
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I worked in that building.
Mr. Bays: Oh you did?
Mr. Kolb: Quite a while, yeah.
Mr. Bays: Was you there? I know you wasn���t there when it burned.
Mr. Kolb: No.
Mr. Bays: Okay.
Mr. Kolb: This would have been 1960s.
Mr. Bays: Who was the plant manager then? Do you remember?
Mr. Kolb: I didn’t work for Y-12, I worked for X-10. Would have been, let’s see, Hibbs was –
Mr. Bays: Lawson.
Mr. Kolb: Oh Charles Lawson, yeah. He was top of everything, right, or maybe he was –
Mr. Bays: He was over the Y-12; then later he was over –
Mr. Kolb: Yeah probably was Lawson. I didn’t get into Y-12 because I didn’t work for Y-12.
Mr. Bays: I knew him real well; he was a fine fellow. And I knew him when he started in the Lab at 9203.
Mr. Kolb: You know Bill Wilcox?
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Good friend of mine now. They came down together. Wilcox and the guy named Bob, Robert McPherson, who wound up at the Lab, and he did a lot of sodium loop testing down in one of the X-10 Engineering buildings. They all came at the same time and lived together initially.
Mr. Bays: Jack Case came on later, I guess.
Mr. Kolb: Oh Case was another one, yeah.
Mr. Bays: And we had John Murray.
Mr. Kolb: Famous John Murray.
Mr. Bays: Yeah, he, for some reason I think I know but I better not tell you ’cause I can’t prove it, he was transferred to Kokomo. Carbide had plants up there. So he came back one time for some event that we were having and I talked to him for some time and I remember him saying very strongly, “You fellows don’t know what a golden place you’ve got to work in.” Says, “I can’t do anything without somebody approving it above me.” He was very unhappy out there.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, is that right?
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: You know, there’s a famous incident where he brought liquor back on a plane.
Mr. Bays: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: And it was discovered and I guess he got arrested or something. Did that have anything to do with having to move or –
Mr. Bays: No.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I just – that’s what everyone knows about Murray.
Mr. Bays: And I don’t know whether –
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Speaking of that Murray incident, I don’t know if you used alcohol or not, but did you have any problems with getting any kind of alcohol when you wanted it here?
Mr. Bays: Well, at the time, if you wanted to get it, you went to Oakdale and got it there. Of course, there was a bootlegger, and –
Mr. Kolb: But then you had to get it back into town. How did you do that?
Mr. Bays: Put it in the trunk and hid it.
Mr. Kolb: It was never found?
Mr. Bays: Most of it was a taxi cab thing over close to where the rehab place is [now] and the grocery store used to be. But right there was a taxi cab place and you could go there and they bootlegged it.
Mr. Kolb: You’d call them up and get home delivery too, I guess.
Mr. Bays: If you wanted to, or you could go up there and get it.
Mr. Kolb: Course, that made the prices higher, but I’m sure –
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: What?
Mr. Bays: I had a problem with drinking.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mr. Bays: This is after the town went wet. So, when I would come in from work in the afternoon, I had a habit of going by the liquor store, and I’d get me a pint or half a pint, and this continued for some time. Then I had two aunts and an uncle that died from drinking whiskey, and that was enough to tell me that you’re going down the same trail, and I quit. And I quit smoking cigarettes about the same time.
Mr. Kolb: Smart thing to do.
Mr. Bays: Yeah, I remember I talked to Dr. – he came from over at X-10 to Y-12. Big tall guy.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, Zanoli?
Mr. Bays: Zanoli.
Mr. Kolb: He’s still around, I think.
Mr. Bays: Oh yeah, I see him down at the [unclear: MOA]. And I told him what had happened, that I had quit. He says, “I’m surprised you didn’t go into a shock giving up that much stuff at one time,” but I didn’t.
Mr. Kolb: Are you talking about every day you got a bottle?
Mr. Bays: I got a bottle practically every day, and I’d smoke two or three packages of cigarettes. I was headed down the –
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, you’re a survivor in spite of yourself.
[break in recording]
Mr. Bays: When they started the mercury process, they brought it in from all over the country there and put it into the COLEX system, I think it was called, and they used lithium deuteride, that’s what their product was, was coming out where they could use the process in an explosion and Alpha 4, 5, and Beta 4 used the mercury. Then when the process shut down, they drained the mercury out of those systems, and we turned up with being responsible for it, and there was about a hundred flask, seventy-six pound flask that they turned over to us. The real bad part about it was they started leaking and they were in rusty cylinders. They started leaking and we had to go buy a new flask, everything. Then we had to build a new warehouse to hold it ’cause if it did start a leak, we had the floor slanted like this, see, and then if it did start, it would go down into a trough and then out where we could catch it. But it was a problem. I got another tale about that mercury if you want to know.
Mr. Kolb: Well, the pollution of the West Fork there is famous. I mean, it cost the government a lot of money to clean that up over the years, but go ahead.
Mr. Bays: Finally, we got over from DOE that we were going to donate the large portion of these out to various states. They, in turn, would send the papers down to me and I would have my people palletize them and get them ready to be shipped out.
Mr. Kolb: Now this is what? Sending them what, the mercury?
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Oh you were going to give the mercury away when you –
Mr. Bays: Yeah. Donate it to each state.
Mr. Kolb: Okay –
Mr. Bays: Go ahead if you will –
Mr. Kolb: No, that’s fine.
Mr. Bays: There was a shipment went through to Chicago headed for Washington state, and Bean, he went out to get the trailer. The trailer itself was gone, but the cab part was still there, and it’d been taken out of this place, and they never did, as far as I know, find out where it went.
Mr. Kolb: A carload you mean?
Mr. Bays: Yep.
Mr. Kolb: With mercury in it?
Mr. Bays: I don’t know how many flask, but you know who signed those papers to ship it out of there and put it in the third degree?
Mr. Kolb: So was this inside the Y-12 plant when this happened?
Mr. Bays: No, it went out of the plant to Chicago by motor freight, and there it was stolen to – they was going to switch it to another carrier, but just the trailer part was stolen and –
Mr. Kolb: But that’s after you lost control of it.
Mr. Bays: Oh, yeah. They started back where it originated from, followed it all the way through.
Mr. Kolb: So you were the last person to have any control over it after it got stolen?
Mr. Bays: Course, I signed the shipping order, which I have signed millions of, and –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, of course. So somebody stole that. They must have known about that being on there, then.
Mr. Bays: Some later years – I don’t know how long it was, I guess five or six years – I went to a meeting in Las Vegas, and there I met an FBI agent, and I thought, well I’ll just ask him, to see. He knew about it.
Mr. Kolb: He did.
Mr. Bays: And he said, “You know what, Mr. Bays? We have not found that mercury yet.”
Mr. Kolb: What year was this approximately?
Mr. Bays: I can’t remember that.
Mr. Kolb: Was it in the ’60s?
Mr. Bays: Must have been, yes.
Mr. Kolb: It was after the process was finished and you were getting rid of the mercury.
Mr. Bays: That’s exactly right. When they took it out of the process, we put it in those old containers started leaking, we had to have those poured into the new containers we bought, and then a new warehouse to hold it. Then we started donating it to the various states all over the country.
Mr. Kolb: So it was a crime that was never solved as far as you [knew] at that time.
Mr. Bays: Never. Now, it was some eight or ten years later that I saw him, that he said, “I know what you’re talking about, exactly.”
Mr. Kolb: Were there any other shipments stolen that you were aware of?
Mr. Bays: Not that I – the only thing that – another thing we had was, and I signed the shipping order on this, we had a lot of machine tools that we accessed, and some way one of those machine tools got – I think we sent them over to some kind of place in Memphis, and there they were sent out to other places, and one of them was put on a ship, and that one that was put on the ship, for some reason they were repainting it, and when they tore the topcoat off, they found it to be rather highly radioactive. So here we go again.
Mr. Kolb: Uh-oh. They hadn’t detected that, hadn’t properly surveyed it?
Mr. Bays: No. Well, what they’d done, they’d painted over the contamination. That was an interesting thing.
Mr. Kolb: That was a machine tool nobody else wanted I guess after that point.
Mr. Bays: That���s right.
Mr. Kolb: My goodness, yeah. So there was a lot of surplusing of equipment, is what you’re talking about, basically? Surplusing?
Mr. Bays: Oh, yes, yes. All along there was a tremendous, especially when Eastman left there they were, we had all the parts for those high voltage cubicles and lots of electrical components that we had.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, that weren’t going to be needed anymore.
Mr. Bays: Nope. We had to dispose of them. I’ll tell you another really odd experience. They used in the calutrons what they called a K-filament. It was just a little bent, about like that and it was about a 1/8th of an inch in diameter, bent like a short horseshoe. I don’t know, it was used in the production, at the time I saw it, in stable isotopes. But, now, during the wartime they were big time of those. Well, we got rid of all those. And, I don’t know how many years later, an access list crossed my desk and they called it the K-filament. And I says, Jesus, that’s got to be what, and they were having a hard time getting the right kind of tungsten to do the work with it. So I sent that to one of the guys and later arranged for him to go up in Chicago and look at it and he says, hey that’s in the original boxes, and I just, get all that we can, move it back in. They were, just by an incident, the fact that I was familiar with the process enough to recognize what they meant by K-filament.
Mr. Kolb: K-filament, and they were tungsten, big tungsten filaments.
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
[break in recording]
Mr. Bays: Right after the war, for some time, they told all the employees to go to the north portal, and they had built the thing for the band, the podium for them to speak on, and General Groves and Nichols came there, and that’s when we all learned what we were doing there.
Mr. Kolb: Oh this was right after the bomb was dropped?
Mr. Bays: Shortly afterwards. Well, about three or four months, I’d say. But he eventually came there and talked about it and what a great thing we had done, and they give us a –
Mr. Kolb: A pin?
Mr. Bays: No, I believe it was some kind of coin, if I remember.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, like a medal.
Mr. Bays: Yeah, gave us all one of those. I’ve still got mine.
Mr. Kolb: That was three or four months after the war ended?
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Well of course you knew, as soon as they dropped the bomb, you knew that we were in the bomb work.
Mr. Bays: Yeah, that’s right. They were there more to congratulate us on the job that we had done.
Mr. Kolb: And that was just for Y-12 people.
Mr. Bays: I don’t remember whether they went to the other places or not.
Mr. Kolb: And that was in Y-12?
Mr. Bays: It was in Y-12, just below the north portal at that time, with the big open space there, and they built stands for them, and then they talked to us for twenty or thirty minutes.
Mr. Kolb: I’d seen a picture of something like that and I thought it happened in town here, but I guess it maybe went to K-25 also.
Mr. Bays: Well, it could have; but what you could be thinking about is when they opened the gates.
Mr. Kolb: No, I’m thinking about after the war.
Mr. Bays: Oh, after the war.
Mr. Kolb: When they were giving out these medals that you were talking about. Yeah, sounds like the same kind of thing. So you got to see General Groves and –
Mr. Bays: Yeah, and Nichols.
Mr. Kolb: Course Nichols you had probably been seeing off and on, but Groves, yeah.
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Groves was quite a character wasn’t he? I guess, from what I understand.
Mr. Bays: Nichols appeared to be a rather quiet, easy going man. Both those two men really are due a lot of credit for what they have had to go through, I think.
Mr. Kolb: Well Groves especially; without him, I don’t think it would have happened.
Mr. Bays: I don���t think it would’ve ever happened.
Mr. Kolb: No, he was not very well liked because he was so hard to get along with. He set impossible goals and people did it, you know. You found out what you could do and what you couldn’t do, apparently.
Mr. Bays: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Have you ever read his biography, his book, Now It Can Be Told?
Mr. Bays: No.
Mr. Kolb: Well you might be interested in it. It’s pretty interesting.
[break in recording]
Mr. Bays: Make it in a flow of time, but it’s impossible for me to do that.
Mr. Kolb: That’s okay, don’t worry about it.
Mr. Bays: That don’t bother you?
Mr. Kolb: No that’s okay, you’ve got some good stories here; that’s what’s important.
Mr. Bays: Well, and another one that I remember, now this is some years later, I went to Las Vegas on a meeting, and the other AEC contractors at that time had representatives there. We met there in Caesar’s Palace four or five days, and while we were there, the guy that was over at that operation there arranged for us to go out to the Nevada Test Site, which I, and –
Mr. Kolb: The Trinity Test Site?
[Editor’s note: The Nevada Test Site is not the Trinity Site. The Trinity Site is in the state of New Mexico.]
Mr. Bays: Yeah, and we went – one thing I remember, the first thing, I guess, is when we went to a mine, it was just a big sixty feet opening in the hard rock and the army was actually doing this and we had a lady in the crowd and they wouldn’t let her go in. They were superstitious, the workers were, and she had to sit in a trailer with some army officer while we all made the tour down. But as you went down – and we rode in a little train, I think – there was things running off of the main –
Mr. Kolb: This is in the rock?
Mr. Bays: In the rock.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mr. Bays: As you went down you’d run into these – and I was told later that we could put an explosion into each one of those things going off, and I guess we went back four or five miles or more into that. It was real interesting.
Mr. Kolb: So they were tunneling by using conventional explosives?
Mr. Bays: No. They were using drills and things of that kind, but they had these mines running off from the main entrance as you went down through it. They could close these off, set their explosion in there, and –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, nuclear testing.
Mr. Bays: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I see what you mean, underground testing.
Mr. Bays: Underground testing.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, which went on for many years.
Mr. Bays: Then they took us to another, is this of interest?
Mr. Kolb: Sure.
Mr. Bays: They took us to another one, and I was fortunate I got to be ��� there was [four] of us as operators, and what we were doing, we were looking at a video they had made of an explosion, and we could operate that video and see how that explosion went. But I can remember that they had a big tower and then they moved it on a rail away from where the explosion was going to be, and you could just see the ground. Then we went out to another spot, and this was rather interesting too. We did what – called the Plowshare Program, are you familiar with it?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, that’s nuclear –
Mr. Bays: Explosion.
Mr. Kolb: Explosion, right.
Mr. Bays: They were trying to develop the least amount of radioactive would come from the explosion, and there was a sign says, “Plowshare Program,” and that really made me interested ’cause I knew we were doing it in Y-12, and there was a tremendous crater out in the desert there.
Mr. Kolb: How was Y-12 involved?
Mr. Bays: They were making the explosion somewhere or parts of it.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, parts, yeah.
Mr. Bays: I guess a lot of people –
Mr. Kolb: So you’d heard the word ‘Plowshare’ and –
Mr. Bays: And the program, yeah. Every month they would [have] a production meeting and there was one that represented the departments and that’s the way I learned about it and learned a lot of the stuff that’s going on in the plant. Another thing that a lot of people, I don’t think, are aware of, but they were making shells that could be shot in a cannon or a big gun. Were you familiar with that?
Mr. Kolb: You mean, nuclear, for nuclear explosions?
Mr. Bays: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Well, we developed that technology. I don’t think we ever used it.
Mr. Bays: I don’t know whether they ever did there or not.
Mr. Kolb: But I know that the U.S. – so Y-12 was involved in that too?
Mr. Bays: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Very, very small, and I’m sure they tested it probably out there.
Mr. Bays: I think they did, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Where they could use so much space they could just –
Mr. Bays: Over the years I was very fortunate to go to Los Alamos and Amarillo, Hanford, Kansas City, to all of those places, but the best one of all of them, right here! We just got back from Louisiana and this is like heaven here.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, you’re right. I have a daughter down in Richland, so we go out – I’d never been to Richland before that, Hanford you know, and learning more about it, ��cause I’d heard about it. And my son-in-law is an engineer. He’s working on the clean-up out there, and apparently they had so much land, they didn’t worry about contaminating the land, they just, back during WORLD WAR II, they just couldn’t worry about it, and now they’ve got to worry about it.
Mr. Bays: Well another thing that I remember, they would take a machine to a big lathe or drill or something, and when it got highly contaminated, they would take them down and bury them, the whole thing.
Mr. Kolb: The whole thing?
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Not just the bit that was contaminated; they take the whole thing.
Mr. Bays: No, the whole thing. See, the one on the ship really set off a lot of things in the plant.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mr. Bays: Then they finally decided, look, if we break even, we will decontaminate them, we’ll take all the paint off, decontaminate them, and then we can send them out to the GSA or whoever wants them. But I can remember going down through there, and the big machine sitting down there, getting ready to cover them up.
Mr. Kolb: In a big landfill?
Mr. Bays: Yeah, there was a big landfill where practically all – just west of Y-12, and they buried a lot of stuff down there. I don’t know whether they’ve ever dug it up or not.
Mr. Kolb: I was just going to ask, I wonder if that’s ever been, probably back then they didn’t line the landfills like they do now to keep the water from getting in, but they may have had to go back.
Mr. Bays: I’ve had a lot of people to call me about that and ask me questions about the location, what I thought went in those.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, ’cause you had to release it, too.
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: You were the last person to sign the release, your name went everywhere.
Mr. Bays: Oh, I tell you what I’d like to have, the requisitions that I have written approving the purchase of material. The lotteries would be small money compared to what I have signed for.
[break in recording]
Mr. Bays: Since you mentioned, there was a lot of what we called tails, that was the code name for lithium deuteride, and lithium that we used in Y-12, and we stored, we filled K-25 up with that stuff, 55-gallon drum, and also up at Paducah, and I don’t know what ever happened to it. And we had to re-drum all of it ’cause the paper, the cardboard type of, just would begin to really deteriorate, so we had to send people down.
Mr. Kolb: What form was this, these tails?
Mr. Bays: In a powder.
Mr. Kolb: Powder, okay.
Mr. Bays: But they sure did deteriorate awful fast and I had to send people up to Paducah to take – and we donated a lot of it to various places.
Mr. Kolb: It has some use in chemical engineering or something?
Mr. Bays: I’m sure, yeah, I’m sure.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah.
Mr. Bays: It was called lithium or tails after it had been used. But when we put it in, it was lithium deuteride. And I think they sorted parts, if I’m not mistaken, the part of the first lithium –
[Side B]
Mr. Kolb: This being a secret town and a guarded town, [did] that bother you at all in any way, all the guards and the fact that it was closed off?
Mr. Bays: No, it really didn’t. I just accepted it was some form of a government operation and [that’s what] they are, but no I sure didn’t. I didn’t know what they were making, but it didn’t bother me at all. I just got up and went to work every day, seven days a week practically.
Mr. Kolb: And when they finally wanted to get rid of the gates and open the town, that was a problem for some people I understand, right?
Mr. Bays: There was, yeah, there sure was. But it wasn’t to me. I remember they brought Rod Cameron.
Mr. Kolb: The ceremony, the movie stars that they brought in.
Mr. Bays: And one of the movie stars, I can’t remember her name. Good looking girl.
Mr. Kolb: There was one glamorous blonde.
Mr. Bays: Yeah, you’re right. And then there was a cowboy, a guy who was a cowboy. And when they all went to dinner down at the Grove Center place, I don’t know who it was – one of them got just drunk. They had to take him to his, up at the –
Mr. Kolb: Got too much Tennessee liquor or whatever. That was a big day, I guess, when they had the big parade and everything.
Mr. Bays: Yes, it was.
Mr. Kolb: But I understand they had a referendum before that to ask people to vote on whether they wanted to open the gates or not, and do you remember that?
Mr. Bays: I remember voting, yeah, but I don’t remember whether it was before or after they opened the gates.
Mr. Kolb: Well it must have been before because I understand it failed and –
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: And they came back and they did it anyways.
Mr. Bays: I can remember when the hospital up here was called Oak Ridge Hospital, and if I’m not mistaken, they almost give that to the Methodist Medical, it may have been some money, but I –
Mr. Kolb: Well, originally, yeah, the Methodist Medical got the hospital. I’m trying to remember if that was the original building or whether they built a new building.
Mr. Bays: Well they did build a new building. It’s the one they have now.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, the original building stayed with that team –
Mr. Bays: ORINS.
Mr. Kolb: The team that did the nuclear response stuff, REAC/TS, they call it now.
Mr. Bays: And OR, let’s see, Oak Ridge –
Mr. Kolb: ORAU?
Mr. Bays: No.
Mr. Kolb: ORINS?
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: O-R-I-N-S, ORINS?
Mr. Bays: Yes, they had some people in there. There was a lot of people that they experimented on there for cancer.
Mr. Kolb: For cancer, right, they had a program there that got to be very controversial in some cases.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Where were you the day the bomb dropped and the news of the atomic project got out? How did you hear about it? Were you at work?
Mr. Bays: I was at work, and a guy’s wife called, one of the guys who worked for me, and he come running into my office and told me about it.
Mr. Kolb: Was it put on the p.a. or anything like that?
Mr. Bays: Later it was, but he told me – his wife, now – and there was another –yes, oh, when Kennedy was assassinated.
Mr. Kolb: Oh yeah.
Mr. Bays: I was at work then, and this same guy came and told me about that. And the same way, his wife called him, too.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, heard about it at home.
Mr. Bays: And called him.
Mr. Kolb: So they heard about it on the national radio first, and it spread to the –
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Okay. Didn’t come through official channels, however.
Mr. Bays: No.
Mr. Kolb: Course once it got out, it spread like wild fire, I’m sure. And wasn’t there a big party in town that night or soon after?
Mr. Bays: I don’t recall. That could have been but I –
Mr. Kolb: You know Ed Westcott took a picture of Jackson Square being filled with people, and a sign WAR ENDS, and looking down at the people partying or having a big turnout in Jackson Square.
Mr. Bays: Now there is about that same time, a picture of people walking out of – you ever seen that one?
Mr. Kolb: Of Y-12?
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Was it a lot of women, women and men both?
Mr. Bays: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Yes.
Mr. Bays: There was a guy in that picture that worked for me.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mr. Bays: I remember that very much.
Mr. Kolb: He’s an interesting fellow. Ed Westcott’s had a stroke.
Mr. Bays: Is he still living?
Mr. Kolb: Oh yeah, oh yeah, he’s in his, probably about 83 or so now. He had a stroke about two years ago. He can’t talk very plainly. He can hear and understand, but he can’t speak very well, so he’s a little bit handicapped that way. I think he can drive a car now. He’s had some paralysis problems but –
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Go ahead.
Mr. Bays: I worked actually for an ensign, and I believe that all the navy officers were officers not, you know, just where I am, and I can’t remember –
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Manford, a few more kind of off-the-wall questions here I’ve got for you, but did you have any contact with any Afro-Americans when you here in WORLD WAR II days? They were here of course.
Mr. Bays: Yes, they were laborers out at the plants. That’s the only contact that I had with them.
Mr. Kolb: Mostly at the plant.
Mr. Bays: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: The fact they were isolated in town, you didn’t have much contact, normal kind of thing here, but they were here. Okay, we talked about the city gates opening and you were here then. Well, what do you think about Oak Ridge as a community that came out of this crazy wartime situation, how it’s evolved over the years?
Mr. Bays: I just made a trip to Louisiana, stayed down there for a week and we got back, you know, while you went – anyhow –
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, this was a vacation trip kind of?
Mr. Bays: And you talk about really appreciating Oak Ridge, every time I go to Louisiana I just think the world of this place. It is home to me. I’ve growed up here. I was only 19 years old, I think, when I went to work here.
Mr. Kolb: Oh I forgot to ask you, you were 19 years old, okay.
Mr. Bays: Yeah and East Tennessee, Oak Ridge, all this is – people that have lived here are very lucky to experience what they’ve experienced in this town. I am really sold on it, I am. We never look out-of-town for a house to buy or get out of Oak Ridge. The facilities are so available, the hospital, we can see it from here, off [inaudible], some years ago, five or six years, my wife had a hip operation. Two or three days later, when she got home, she woke up in the morning and said I can’t breathe. And so I called the people out, and they thought she was having a heart attack, but I told them I don’t think so. And when we finally got her to hospital they determined she had a blood clot from the operation, and if we hadn’t lived this close to that place, she’d be dead. That’s one reason we like Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Well, a lot of people move from out of town into town for that reason too, because they want to be close to the medical facilities.
Mr. Bays: And I personally think that we’ve got some of the best doctors around. I’ve had two bypasses, one of three, one of four, and Dr. Lawson is my cardiologist. I think the world of him. I was a diabetic. Bunick was my doctor there; I see her once a year. So we are just blessed to have doctors that we have in the town. Our services are all good.
Mr. Kolb: Right. It’s not a cheap place to live.
Mr. Bays: No it isn’t.
Mr. Kolb: But it’s good.
Mr. Bays: It’s good.
Mr. Kolb: You get what you pay for; you don’t pay for nothing, you ain’t going to get nothing, either, right?
Mr. Bays: That’s right. And I don’t ever think about moving out of the town. Never have since I’ve been here.
Mr. Kolb: You’re right. Everyone I talk to says the same thing, basically. Of course, Hanford was totally different because it was like a paper town. They had built it so fast and then it decayed and then had to build it over again for the Cold War period. There are a lot of the same things out there, same kind of houses, and I’m sure they had a lot of similar experiences.
Mr. Bays: Yeah, I’ve visited Hanford.
Mr. Kolb: But it’s not, the climate is not nearly like ours. I mean, it’s hot and it’s dry and then it gets cold. And then they don’t have the rainfall that we do, so it’s just different. And I don’t know much about Los Alamos. I’m sure it’s a pretty area, but it’s pretty remote too.
Mr. Bays: Yeah, it is. It’s out from Amarillo.
Mr. Kolb: But as far as the three sites, this has got everything beat.
Mr. Bays: I think so.
Mr. Kolb: And I guess I’m glad that Grove decided not to build all those big reactors right in the middle of this reservation; we’d have so much contamination around it, it would have been horrible.
Mr. Bays: I saw something recently where I think Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and, I think, Hanford is still running, but there’s not over six or seven, there’re less contractors now.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, they narrowed it way down.
Mr. Bays: It’s a way, way –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Bays: Yeah, we had place in Kansas City, right there. Is the one in Portsmouth still running? I guess it is.
Mr. Kolb: No that’s private now, private company, U.S. Enrichment has bought all that. Yeah, that’s all privatized.
Mr. Bays: There used to be an outfit in St. Louis.
Mr. Kolb: Mallencott?
Mr. Bays: Yeah, that’s who it was.
Mr. Kolb: Chemical?
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Well they were like a contractor or something during the war, yeah. They were working on the uranium.
Mr. Bays: Then there was a Silas Mason Hanger located down in the Midwest and I think they were in the storage facilities at that time.
Mr. Kolb: Well during the war, WORLD WAR II, I mean, there were thousands of companies working on this, literally thousands.
Mr. Bays: A lot of people don’t realize that.
Mr. Kolb: I mean, little, big, you just name it, it was a huge – I mean, not just all these secret cities, but all this stuff going on all over the country feeding into the system for whatever they did. It was gargantuan management.
Mr. Bays: I think over the years, as a whole, we’ve had terrific managers of the Y-12 plant. Hibbs was a terrific manager.
Mr. Kolb: Case was good too, as I understand it.
Mr. Bays: Yeah, I liked Murray, but I just happened to agree with him.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, Clark Center, I guess, was very –
Mr. Bays: He was a very nice guy too.
Mr. Kolb: He’s doing oral histories, too, on his own.
Mr. Bays: Is that right?
Mr. Kolb: Of people that he knew back there.
Mr. Bays: Where does he live now?
Mr. Kolb: I guess he’s up in New York, up in the Northeast maybe, New York somewhere, I’m not sure, but that’s my impression I have. I guess he’s still alive too. He would be way up there if he is. I’m sure we would have known if he passed away ’cause his name is very prominent down here. Well, Manford, I think that will do it.
Mr. Bays: Okay.
Mr. Kolb: Anything else you want to ���
Mr. Bays: That’s all that I can think of.
Mr. Kolb: – throw in the pot?
Mr. Bays: When you get home, I’ll –
Mr. Kolb: Well, okay.
[end of recording]

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ORAL HISTORY OF MANFORD BAYS
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
May 24, 2005
[Side A]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Mr. Bays, why don't we start out by you telling us when and why you first came to Oak Ridge, okay?
Mr. Bays: I lived in Fort Worth, Texas before I came here. My mother and father also, but my father and mother moved from Fort Worth to here.
Mr. Kolb: To Oak Ridge?
Mr. Bays: Yes, sometime in February, and –
Mr. Kolb: What year?
Mr. Bays: ’44. My father contacted me and wanted me to come up, so we came up here, and then I got a job here about two or three days later.
Mr. Kolb: Did your father work in the project too?
Mr. Bays: Yes he did. He worked at the Gaseous Diffusion Plant.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, and you got a job where?
Mr. Bays: In Y-12.
Mr. Kolb: In two days, you got a job?
Mr. Bays: Yep, they were really wanting you then.
Mr. Kolb: What kind of work did you start out doing?
Mr. Bays: Materials Department.
Mr. Kolb: Materials Department, at Y-12?
Mr. Bays: At Y-12.
Mr. Kolb: That was a big busy plant back then, wasn’t it?
Mr. Bays: Yeah, it was. It sure was. You know, I recall a person there that I haven’t seen anything about him in years: Dr. Conklin was the head of Y-12 at the time I went there. He was with Tennessee Eastman and came down from Kingsport to run the Y-12 plant.
Mr. Kolb: Is he still alive? Do you know?
Mr. Bays: I have no idea.
Mr. Kolb: You just don’t know.
Mr. Bays: No.
Mr. Kolb: I don’t know of him. I guess he left Oak Ridge some time ago.
Mr. Bays: Oh, when Eastman pulled out, he left Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, well let’s talk about your work experience in Y-12 then, during the wartime years. What did you do and how big was your group? Who did you work with? That kind of thing.
Mr. Bays: I started in the Storage Department as a stock keeper. Then I was a materials engineer, which included making a catalog of all the items in stock. Back at that time we had around fifty thousand dollars valued at somewhere around twenty million dollars. And then I moved up to a materials engineer and from there I was mailing supervisor in the Materials Department and I moved up later to the head of the Materials Department when I retired.
Mr. Kolb: How big a group was that back in the WORLD WAR II days?
Mr. Bays: At the time I left, there was around two hundred people in the Materials Department.
Mr. Kolb: Now, when you say ‘material,’ does that cover all the materials that Y-12 used?
Mr. Bays: Yeah, and the storage function.
Mr. Kolb: And storage?
Mr. Bays: Yeah, that’s right.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause what I’m thinking about, the fact that the silver was taken out of West Point and brought into Y-12 to help make the coils, right?
Mr. Bays: Right.
Mr. Kolb: Was that under part of your control too?
Mr. Bays: No, it was not.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mr. Bays: The mercury that was there was under my control.
Mr. Kolb: And I guess the uranium product would have been treated specially too.
Mr. Bays: No, that’s exactly right.
Mr. Kolb: That was special.
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: But everything else, that’s a huge amount of material.
Mr. Bays: It was. We had five or six warehouses and quite a job to keep up with it and to keep up with the progress of how to handle material and how to reorder it, which I was responsible for.
Mr. Kolb: What building or buildings did you work in?
Mr. Bays: 9720-5 was the last one. I started to work in 9720-1. Then from there I went to 9720-6, which was an Air Force hanger that had been prefabbed and they decided to move it to Y-12, and it looked just like a hanger. It’s still out there, I believe.
Mr. Kolb: It is?
Mr. Bays: Yes. And I’m sure people are still working at it. [After working in 9720-1], I moved there and then from there they built a new warehouse in 9720-5.
Mr. Kolb: I worked for a while in Y-12 back in the ’60’s and I don’t recall ever seeing that hanger. I worked in, they call it – everything was dash something. Dash three, I think. Anyway, I –
Mr. Bays: Was it 9201-3?
Mr. Kolb: Mhm.
Mr. Bays: Well I can tell you something else about that. At the time when I first came there, that was not known as 9201-3. It was 9201 alpha one the fifth.
Mr. Kolb: Alpha one the fifth.
Mr. Bays: One fifth.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, one fifth.
Mr. Bays: Yes. Why, I have no idea.
Mr. Kolb: The fraction, one fifth?
Mr. Bays: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve never heard that.
Mr. Bays: Then they put it in order with the other ones: dash one, dash two, and dash three. At the time I first came there, that’s what was on them. While I was there, there was really a big water break in this particular building.
Mr. Kolb: In that building?
Mr. Bays: Yes. In the high voltage cubicles, there was a ceramic water cooler system where water froze and kept the tubes that were sitting in them cool, and they started popping the ceramic parts, and the water flowed all the way down into the basement before they finally got it stopped.
Mr. Kolb: Ooh, that shorted out a lot of electricity I bet.
Mr. Bays: Oh, it did. It was a mess. And to clean it up too, can you imagine?
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I bet. But were there other buildings that had fractional names like that, like ‘one fifth’?
Mr. Bays: No, that’s the only one that I recall.
Mr. Kolb: But you don’t know why it was called that?
Mr. Bays: No sir, I don’t.
Mr. Kolb: Well, you and your wife lived in Oak Ridge when you came here.
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: What kind of housing did you –
Mr. Bays: We first moved into, down at 271 Vermont Avenue. I stayed there approximately a year and moved in –
Mr. Kolb: Well, what, what kind of housing was it?
Mr. Bays: It was an “E1”.
Mr. Kolb: “E1” apartment.
Mr. Bays: Right, then we moved to an “E2” at 213 [Vermont Avenue].
Mr. Kolb: Did you have any children then?
Mr. Bays: Yes, one daughter.
Mr. Kolb: One daughter.
Mr. Bays: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Did that help you get a house you think?
Mr. Bays: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, probably so, the fact you had a child, yeah. So that was Vermont, just down the street here.
Mr. Bays: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: How long did you live there?
Mr. Bays: About a year there.
Mr. Kolb: And then –
Mr. Bays: There was really an odd thing happened while I was there at 213. A guy knocked on the door one day, and he was with the Associated Press, I think, and they had just released the business about the spies that had come down from Kingsport.
Mr. Kolb: Spies?
Mr. Bays: Yes. Are you familiar with this?
Mr. Kolb: I’ve never heard this, I don’t know.
Mr. Bays: Okay.
Mr. Kolb: German spies?
Mr. Bays: No, I don’t know who they were, but unfortunately I moved into the apartment at 213 where this guy lived that was one of them and the guy went to talk –
Mr. Kolb: He was one of your neighbors?
Mr. Bays: No, he moved out and I moved right in.
Mr. Kolb: Oh I see, okay.
Mr. Bays: And they wanted to know if I knew anything about him and I didn’t, so it was something to remember.
Mr. Kolb: Well, tell me more about this spy story. I mean, I’ve never heard anything about this.
Mr. Bays: Oh, that was a really – and then there was involved a women and man and it – but the particular – and I cannot remember the guy’s name, but I do know he worked at the Ordinance at Kingsport and he came down here. A close friend of mine, I guess it was sometime after they arrested him, [said] that a guy named Walt Cameron, he’s dead now, was a close friend of this fellow and didn’t know anything. But for some years they questioned him very, very thoroughly to try to see if he had any information that would help them in the case.
Mr. Kolb: But who was this person spying for?
Mr. Bays: I say Russians, I’m sure.
Mr. Kolb: Russians, okay. I guess they were a bigger problem than the Nazis were at that time, and we didn’t know it then but, did we? It all came out later. But was this –
Mr. Bays: Oh, it was a big deal then, man oh man.
Mr. Kolb: And the Associated Press wrote this story up?
Mr. Bays: Oh yes, and there was a writer with them that came to the door and wanted to know what I knew. Of course I knew nothing about the situation.
Mr. Kolb: Did this come out in the local press at all?
Mr. Bays: It sure did, Knoxville papers and probably all over the country.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, Associated Press, I guess so. I’d never heard that, you see. So many things went on you just can’t believe. You just happened to be in that same apartment, that they were tracking you, whether you knew anything about them. So the FBI came and then questioned you?
Mr. Bays: No, no.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, just, just the press.
Mr. Bays: Just the pressman.
Mr. Kolb: Well, okay, you lived at Vermont and you went where after that?
Mr. Bays: I lived at 213 and 217 Vermont Avenue.
Mr. Kolb: Oh you just moved a few –
Mr. Bays: Blocks up the street now where the SunTrust Bank is now.
Mr. Kolb: Did you get a bigger place then?
Mr. Bays: Then I got a two-bedroom apartment. Then we moved here, where we’ve been ever since.
Mr. Kolb: And when did you move here?
Mr. Bays: I’d say about ’45, ’46, I believe.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, way back early.
Mr. Bays: Yeah it was in the early days.
Mr. Kolb: So this is what kind of house?
Mr. Bays: It’s an “A” house.
Mr. Kolb: “A” house. An “A”?
Mr. Bays: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: It’s a big “A”.
Mr. Bays: Well this part is all been added and a basement underneath us has been added.
Mr. Kolb: Okay but “A”s were a one-bedroom house, weren’t they?
Mr. Bays: No, they were always a two-bedroom. And “B” was two-bedroom and a “C” was three-bedroom.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, a two-bedroom, so this is all added here, where we’re sitting?
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So you’ve been right in this same neighborhood all these years.
Mr. Bays: All this time, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Well that’s amazing. Yeah, that’s interesting. And how many children did you have over –
Mr. Bays: One.
Mr. Kolb: You just had one child.
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: A daughter?
Mr. Bays: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, and she’s the one in Virginia.
Mr. Bays: Right.
Mr. Kolb: Right, okay. So what school did she go to?
Mr. Bays: Here, she started school here and graduated –
Mr. Kolb: In Pine Valley?
Mr. Bays: She sure did go to Pine Valley.
Mr. Kolb: My wife started teaching in Oak Ridge in Pine Valley in ’55.
Mr. Bays: She still has friends that she went to school with here and she visits them and they visit her. Real nice.
Mr. Kolb: What class of high school was she in, do you know about?
Mr. Bays: I’m guessing ’62.
Mr. Kolb: Somewhere in there.
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Early sixties. How was living in Oak Ridge back in the wartime days? Did you have enough food? Did you get enough?
Mr. Bays: I had really no problem along those lines that I recall at all.
Mr. Kolb: Of course things were rationed. You had to deal with –
Mr. Bays: Yes, you had to deal with that.
Mr. Kolb: Standing in lines and that sort of thing, yeah.
Mr. Bays: Gas was also rationed.
Mr. Kolb: Oh yeah, and nylons, people painted their legs.
Mr. Bays: And back in those days we had wood sidewalks. You remember them?
Mr. Kolb: The boardwalks.
Mr. Bays: Boardwalks. The Turnpike was on one side of me and Vermont Avenue on the other and at that time it was nothing but gravel and all the time during the day they would run trucks spraying water over this to keep the dust down, you may remember all that.
Mr. Kolb: No, I came in ’54, so everything was paved by then.
Mr. Bays: Oh, it was, okay.
Mr. Kolb: Of course you didn’t have to deal with as much mud since you had gravel.
Mr. Bays: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I guess some of the streets maybe weren’t quite treated but it was better than ’42 when everything was just mud.
Mr. Bays: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Well did you and your wife belong to any clubs or churches back then? What did you do for recreation?
Mr. Bays: Oh, this is a picture, 1969, December, the bowling team that I was on. And that was probably the most well-known fellow there.
Mr. Kolb: You’re…?
Mr. Bays: In this top one, right there.
Mr. Kolb: Did you bowl at the Oak Terrace?
Mr. Bays: No, at the old one. I mean that they’ve now got some kind of a – I don’t know what’s in it.
Mr. Kolb: Well there’s one up in Jackson Square, bowling.
Mr. Bays: There was then, and one at Grove Center.
Mr. Kolb: That’s the Oak Terrace, is that where?
Mr. Bays: Then when they closed it, I didn’t actually bowl in those two alleys anymore until they went to the one at Downtown.
Mr. Kolb: Oh there was one downtown?
Mr. Bays: Yeah, it’s –
Mr. Kolb: At Midtown?
Mr. Bays: No, right down next to the mall.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mr. Bays: I think there’s a DPI or something like that business.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, it was a recreation center building there then?
Mr. Bays: Mostly a bowling center.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, bowling, okay. It was all called Midtown back then, right?
Mr. Bays: No, Midtown was farther west than that.
Mr. Kolb: Further west. Well, okay, I know, I’ve seen pictures of that building. So who were these guys in this team here? Can you tell me who they are? Were they plant guys from Y-12?
Mr. Bays: This is actually a league, Y-12 League. This is Elmer Johnson, that’s George Reese, me, can’t remember that guy, that’s Harry Keene. Now I know, of this group, Harry is still living, Nelson Tibbets, I can’t remember his name, Teddy Peckman, can’t remember that guy’s name.
Mr. Kolb: So when did you start bowling with the league, was it during wartime or was it later?
Mr. Bays: Later.
Mr. Kolb: But bowling was real popular back –
Mr. Bays: Oh that was one of the big – and the softball was also very popular, ’cause the plant footed the bill for all that in those days. That made a big difference.
Mr. Kolb: Oh yeah, that’s right, prize money, and there were prizes and that sort of thing. Did your wife bowl too or just you?
Mr. Bays: No, just me.
Mr. Kolb: Did you belong to any –
Mr. Bays: Oh, I was in the Lions Club at one –
Mr. Kolb: You were? I'm a Lion. So you were in the Oak Ridge Lions Club?
Mr. Bays: Yes, I was in it back when they had the, I guess, nigger minstrels, ever heard that before?
Mr. Kolb: Nigger? Well you don’t use that word anymore, of course.
Mr. Bays: I know. That’s what they did then.
Mr. Kolb: Negro minstrels?
Mr. Bays: Negro minstrels. And what it was, I was one of the “end men,” they called them, and it was a show.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, well you played the part of a minstrel?
Mr. Bays: End man, yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I see.
Mr. Bays: Quite interesting.
Mr. Kolb: So you put on a show.
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: To raise money?
Mr. Bays: Yeah, to raise money for the Lions Club.
Mr. Kolb: Okay I’d never known that. I mean, I’ve heard of minstrel shows but not the fact that you – I’ll be darned.
Mr. Bays: Oh, I was trying to think if I could, yeah, Bob Gray. I don’t know whether you know him or not.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah I know Bob Gray.
Mr. Bays: Bob was one of the –
Mr. Kolb: He’s retired from the metallurgical, MC Division and I, you probably, well, Herb Diggs.
Mr. Bays: Yeah Herb was one of them at that time.
Mr. Kolb: Was he in there? And oh, there’s a lot of old Lions; that club is really old. But yeah, I’m trying to think of –
Mr. Bays: We used to get out and sell brooms.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, which they still do, brooms and mops and light bulbs.
Mr. Bays: Remember getting dog-bit one time up. I was walking down the street carrying the brooms and mops and all of a sudden a dog catches me behind. I didn’t even see it. It didn’t bark, and it scared me.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve had some close shaves that way, but I usually had a broom handy enough to swat them away. Okay, so were you a charter member of the club then?
Mr. Bays: No.
Mr. Kolb: ’Cause I know it started back in the ’40s sometime during the World War II days.
Mr. Bays: No, I was not.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I’m in the Century Lions. They sponsored our club. We’re a noon club and they’re the evening club in town now. Well, did you belong to any churches in town?
Mr. Bays: No, well, yeah, went to United Church on the Hill.
Mr. Kolb: Chapel on the Hill?
Mr. Bays: Yep, sure did. I was also a Mason. I’m a 50-year member of the Masonic Lodge.
Mr. Kolb: Great, and so that Chapel on the Hill, was [that] when they had different denominations having [the] same –
Mr. Bays: Yes, at that time there was; several denominations used that one facility.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve been told that that was one of several chapels in town that was used that way. Is that right or not?
Mr. Bays: Well, the only way I can remember is all the church was used by several different denominations until they could build a church; that’s the way I saw it.
Mr. Kolb: But, I mean, were there other chapels built in Oak Ridge?
Mr. Bays: Oh, I don’t think so. I believe that was the first and only one at that time.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, of course there was probably one out in Happy Valley or K-25, I imagine.
Mr. Bays: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: But it was torn down real fast, too, when that went away.
Mr. Bays: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Okay. So you had this, every hour, a different set-up came in.
Mr. Bays: Yeah that’s right, real interesting, and I met a lot of good people then.
Mr. Kolb: Did you get to the Smokies or do hikes and that sort of thing back in those days?
Mr. Bays: No, we didn’t hike, but we would go up – and, by the way, at that time you had to have a pass to get into Oak Ridge, and if we were going to have company, we would have to arrange for them a pass at a certain gate. And so we went up to the Smokies several times, and when we had company we would always take them up there.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, real popular place. Remember the old, big hotel there? It was right on the corner where the road to Cosby takes off, Mountain something. They had a good dining room; that’s what I remember. I mean, I never stayed there, just went to their dining room; this was back in the ’50s, early ’60s.
Mr. Bays: I’ve got some notes here.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, let me just turn this –
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mr. Bays: We moved here May 1, 1944 from Fort Worth, Texas. I went to work at Y-12 the 6th day of May in 1944 in the Materials Department. Oh, Tennessee Eastman Company. When we were off for Christmas in the ’40s, nobody suspected it, but when we got back they were closing the plant down, when we got back from the holidays.
Mr. Kolb: What year was that?
Mr. Bays: I don’t remember that, sir.
Mr. Kolb: After the war ended?
Mr. Bays: Yeah I guess it was.
Mr. Kolb: Probably about ’47 or so.
Mr. Bays: Something like that.
Mr. Kolb: I think is when I remember closing one. Did you lose your job then?
Mr. Bays: No, I continued to work. Then about a year later, the supervisor of the department called me in. He said, “What’s your plans?” I said, “I’m just waiting for you to give my notice.” And he said, “How would you like to stay around for a month?” And I said, “Well that would be great ’cause I’m going back to Fort Worth and that will just delay my trip on me.” He said, “Well, I can’t promise you anything anymore.” So I stayed on then, and forty-seven years I’ve been in.
Mr. Kolb: Just worked out.
Mr. Bays: Yeah, worked out great.
Mr. Kolb: Fort Worth just had to do without you, right?
Mr. Bays: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: So you worked for forty-seven years?
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Wow, great.
Mr. Bays: And while I was there – I can’t remember the buildings, but they were administrative buildings ’cause I was at that time a materials engineer, and he was – are you familiar how you go into – I’ll call it the “central portal” at Y-12? You go down the hill and you hit a portal. Right on that hill there where the north – that portal was about three or four buildings, and when we come back to work shortly after Christmas, the buildings had burned and we had to sit around in the Cafeteria for some time until we could get back in the building and recover any records we had.
Mr. Kolb: Was that the building you worked in, you mean?
Mr. Bays: Yes, yes, we worked in one.
Mr. Kolb: Is that close to the Cafeteria building?
Mr. Bays: No it’s down farther west.
Mr. Kolb: Further west than there, okay.
Mr. Bays: No, East; I beg your pardon.
Mr. Kolb: East.
Mr. Bays: Yeah, do you know where the Biology Division is?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah.
Mr. Bays: Okay it’s just west of there on the hill. There’s nothing there now. There may be a concrete vault, brick vault that was used.
Mr. Kolb: Well you know where, what they used to call the Administration Building – I don’t know the number of it – it’s where all the bigwigs had their offices.
Mr. Bays: Yeah, 9704-2.
Mr. Kolb: Well, is that close to where you’re talking about?
Mr. Bays: No I’m talking east of there. In fact, if you looked at it now you couldn’t tell there’s ever been a building there.
Mr. Kolb: Well I used to go in that portal, and there used to be a small building, this building you called a “fish bowl,” and the reason it was called a fish bowl, because inside, it was all glass partitions. You could look down the whole building and see everything.
Mr. Bays: I think that was where Dr. Conklin’s office probably was ’cause it was adjoining.
Mr. Kolb: All office space. Is this the area you are talking about?
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I worked in that building.
Mr. Bays: Oh you did?
Mr. Kolb: Quite a while, yeah.
Mr. Bays: Was you there? I know you wasn���t there when it burned.
Mr. Kolb: No.
Mr. Bays: Okay.
Mr. Kolb: This would have been 1960s.
Mr. Bays: Who was the plant manager then? Do you remember?
Mr. Kolb: I didn’t work for Y-12, I worked for X-10. Would have been, let’s see, Hibbs was –
Mr. Bays: Lawson.
Mr. Kolb: Oh Charles Lawson, yeah. He was top of everything, right, or maybe he was –
Mr. Bays: He was over the Y-12; then later he was over –
Mr. Kolb: Yeah probably was Lawson. I didn’t get into Y-12 because I didn’t work for Y-12.
Mr. Bays: I knew him real well; he was a fine fellow. And I knew him when he started in the Lab at 9203.
Mr. Kolb: You know Bill Wilcox?
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Good friend of mine now. They came down together. Wilcox and the guy named Bob, Robert McPherson, who wound up at the Lab, and he did a lot of sodium loop testing down in one of the X-10 Engineering buildings. They all came at the same time and lived together initially.
Mr. Bays: Jack Case came on later, I guess.
Mr. Kolb: Oh Case was another one, yeah.
Mr. Bays: And we had John Murray.
Mr. Kolb: Famous John Murray.
Mr. Bays: Yeah, he, for some reason I think I know but I better not tell you ’cause I can’t prove it, he was transferred to Kokomo. Carbide had plants up there. So he came back one time for some event that we were having and I talked to him for some time and I remember him saying very strongly, “You fellows don’t know what a golden place you’ve got to work in.” Says, “I can’t do anything without somebody approving it above me.” He was very unhappy out there.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, is that right?
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: You know, there’s a famous incident where he brought liquor back on a plane.
Mr. Bays: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: And it was discovered and I guess he got arrested or something. Did that have anything to do with having to move or –
Mr. Bays: No.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I just – that’s what everyone knows about Murray.
Mr. Bays: And I don’t know whether –
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Speaking of that Murray incident, I don’t know if you used alcohol or not, but did you have any problems with getting any kind of alcohol when you wanted it here?
Mr. Bays: Well, at the time, if you wanted to get it, you went to Oakdale and got it there. Of course, there was a bootlegger, and –
Mr. Kolb: But then you had to get it back into town. How did you do that?
Mr. Bays: Put it in the trunk and hid it.
Mr. Kolb: It was never found?
Mr. Bays: Most of it was a taxi cab thing over close to where the rehab place is [now] and the grocery store used to be. But right there was a taxi cab place and you could go there and they bootlegged it.
Mr. Kolb: You’d call them up and get home delivery too, I guess.
Mr. Bays: If you wanted to, or you could go up there and get it.
Mr. Kolb: Course, that made the prices higher, but I’m sure –
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: What?
Mr. Bays: I had a problem with drinking.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mr. Bays: This is after the town went wet. So, when I would come in from work in the afternoon, I had a habit of going by the liquor store, and I’d get me a pint or half a pint, and this continued for some time. Then I had two aunts and an uncle that died from drinking whiskey, and that was enough to tell me that you’re going down the same trail, and I quit. And I quit smoking cigarettes about the same time.
Mr. Kolb: Smart thing to do.
Mr. Bays: Yeah, I remember I talked to Dr. – he came from over at X-10 to Y-12. Big tall guy.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, Zanoli?
Mr. Bays: Zanoli.
Mr. Kolb: He’s still around, I think.
Mr. Bays: Oh yeah, I see him down at the [unclear: MOA]. And I told him what had happened, that I had quit. He says, “I’m surprised you didn’t go into a shock giving up that much stuff at one time,” but I didn’t.
Mr. Kolb: Are you talking about every day you got a bottle?
Mr. Bays: I got a bottle practically every day, and I’d smoke two or three packages of cigarettes. I was headed down the –
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, you’re a survivor in spite of yourself.
[break in recording]
Mr. Bays: When they started the mercury process, they brought it in from all over the country there and put it into the COLEX system, I think it was called, and they used lithium deuteride, that’s what their product was, was coming out where they could use the process in an explosion and Alpha 4, 5, and Beta 4 used the mercury. Then when the process shut down, they drained the mercury out of those systems, and we turned up with being responsible for it, and there was about a hundred flask, seventy-six pound flask that they turned over to us. The real bad part about it was they started leaking and they were in rusty cylinders. They started leaking and we had to go buy a new flask, everything. Then we had to build a new warehouse to hold it ’cause if it did start a leak, we had the floor slanted like this, see, and then if it did start, it would go down into a trough and then out where we could catch it. But it was a problem. I got another tale about that mercury if you want to know.
Mr. Kolb: Well, the pollution of the West Fork there is famous. I mean, it cost the government a lot of money to clean that up over the years, but go ahead.
Mr. Bays: Finally, we got over from DOE that we were going to donate the large portion of these out to various states. They, in turn, would send the papers down to me and I would have my people palletize them and get them ready to be shipped out.
Mr. Kolb: Now this is what? Sending them what, the mercury?
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Oh you were going to give the mercury away when you –
Mr. Bays: Yeah. Donate it to each state.
Mr. Kolb: Okay –
Mr. Bays: Go ahead if you will –
Mr. Kolb: No, that’s fine.
Mr. Bays: There was a shipment went through to Chicago headed for Washington state, and Bean, he went out to get the trailer. The trailer itself was gone, but the cab part was still there, and it’d been taken out of this place, and they never did, as far as I know, find out where it went.
Mr. Kolb: A carload you mean?
Mr. Bays: Yep.
Mr. Kolb: With mercury in it?
Mr. Bays: I don’t know how many flask, but you know who signed those papers to ship it out of there and put it in the third degree?
Mr. Kolb: So was this inside the Y-12 plant when this happened?
Mr. Bays: No, it went out of the plant to Chicago by motor freight, and there it was stolen to – they was going to switch it to another carrier, but just the trailer part was stolen and –
Mr. Kolb: But that’s after you lost control of it.
Mr. Bays: Oh, yeah. They started back where it originated from, followed it all the way through.
Mr. Kolb: So you were the last person to have any control over it after it got stolen?
Mr. Bays: Course, I signed the shipping order, which I have signed millions of, and –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, of course. So somebody stole that. They must have known about that being on there, then.
Mr. Bays: Some later years – I don’t know how long it was, I guess five or six years – I went to a meeting in Las Vegas, and there I met an FBI agent, and I thought, well I’ll just ask him, to see. He knew about it.
Mr. Kolb: He did.
Mr. Bays: And he said, “You know what, Mr. Bays? We have not found that mercury yet.”
Mr. Kolb: What year was this approximately?
Mr. Bays: I can’t remember that.
Mr. Kolb: Was it in the ’60s?
Mr. Bays: Must have been, yes.
Mr. Kolb: It was after the process was finished and you were getting rid of the mercury.
Mr. Bays: That’s exactly right. When they took it out of the process, we put it in those old containers started leaking, we had to have those poured into the new containers we bought, and then a new warehouse to hold it. Then we started donating it to the various states all over the country.
Mr. Kolb: So it was a crime that was never solved as far as you [knew] at that time.
Mr. Bays: Never. Now, it was some eight or ten years later that I saw him, that he said, “I know what you’re talking about, exactly.”
Mr. Kolb: Were there any other shipments stolen that you were aware of?
Mr. Bays: Not that I – the only thing that – another thing we had was, and I signed the shipping order on this, we had a lot of machine tools that we accessed, and some way one of those machine tools got – I think we sent them over to some kind of place in Memphis, and there they were sent out to other places, and one of them was put on a ship, and that one that was put on the ship, for some reason they were repainting it, and when they tore the topcoat off, they found it to be rather highly radioactive. So here we go again.
Mr. Kolb: Uh-oh. They hadn’t detected that, hadn’t properly surveyed it?
Mr. Bays: No. Well, what they’d done, they’d painted over the contamination. That was an interesting thing.
Mr. Kolb: That was a machine tool nobody else wanted I guess after that point.
Mr. Bays: That���s right.
Mr. Kolb: My goodness, yeah. So there was a lot of surplusing of equipment, is what you’re talking about, basically? Surplusing?
Mr. Bays: Oh, yes, yes. All along there was a tremendous, especially when Eastman left there they were, we had all the parts for those high voltage cubicles and lots of electrical components that we had.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, that weren’t going to be needed anymore.
Mr. Bays: Nope. We had to dispose of them. I’ll tell you another really odd experience. They used in the calutrons what they called a K-filament. It was just a little bent, about like that and it was about a 1/8th of an inch in diameter, bent like a short horseshoe. I don’t know, it was used in the production, at the time I saw it, in stable isotopes. But, now, during the wartime they were big time of those. Well, we got rid of all those. And, I don’t know how many years later, an access list crossed my desk and they called it the K-filament. And I says, Jesus, that’s got to be what, and they were having a hard time getting the right kind of tungsten to do the work with it. So I sent that to one of the guys and later arranged for him to go up in Chicago and look at it and he says, hey that’s in the original boxes, and I just, get all that we can, move it back in. They were, just by an incident, the fact that I was familiar with the process enough to recognize what they meant by K-filament.
Mr. Kolb: K-filament, and they were tungsten, big tungsten filaments.
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
[break in recording]
Mr. Bays: Right after the war, for some time, they told all the employees to go to the north portal, and they had built the thing for the band, the podium for them to speak on, and General Groves and Nichols came there, and that’s when we all learned what we were doing there.
Mr. Kolb: Oh this was right after the bomb was dropped?
Mr. Bays: Shortly afterwards. Well, about three or four months, I’d say. But he eventually came there and talked about it and what a great thing we had done, and they give us a –
Mr. Kolb: A pin?
Mr. Bays: No, I believe it was some kind of coin, if I remember.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, like a medal.
Mr. Bays: Yeah, gave us all one of those. I’ve still got mine.
Mr. Kolb: That was three or four months after the war ended?
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Well of course you knew, as soon as they dropped the bomb, you knew that we were in the bomb work.
Mr. Bays: Yeah, that’s right. They were there more to congratulate us on the job that we had done.
Mr. Kolb: And that was just for Y-12 people.
Mr. Bays: I don’t remember whether they went to the other places or not.
Mr. Kolb: And that was in Y-12?
Mr. Bays: It was in Y-12, just below the north portal at that time, with the big open space there, and they built stands for them, and then they talked to us for twenty or thirty minutes.
Mr. Kolb: I’d seen a picture of something like that and I thought it happened in town here, but I guess it maybe went to K-25 also.
Mr. Bays: Well, it could have; but what you could be thinking about is when they opened the gates.
Mr. Kolb: No, I’m thinking about after the war.
Mr. Bays: Oh, after the war.
Mr. Kolb: When they were giving out these medals that you were talking about. Yeah, sounds like the same kind of thing. So you got to see General Groves and –
Mr. Bays: Yeah, and Nichols.
Mr. Kolb: Course Nichols you had probably been seeing off and on, but Groves, yeah.
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Groves was quite a character wasn’t he? I guess, from what I understand.
Mr. Bays: Nichols appeared to be a rather quiet, easy going man. Both those two men really are due a lot of credit for what they have had to go through, I think.
Mr. Kolb: Well Groves especially; without him, I don’t think it would have happened.
Mr. Bays: I don���t think it would’ve ever happened.
Mr. Kolb: No, he was not very well liked because he was so hard to get along with. He set impossible goals and people did it, you know. You found out what you could do and what you couldn’t do, apparently.
Mr. Bays: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: Have you ever read his biography, his book, Now It Can Be Told?
Mr. Bays: No.
Mr. Kolb: Well you might be interested in it. It’s pretty interesting.
[break in recording]
Mr. Bays: Make it in a flow of time, but it’s impossible for me to do that.
Mr. Kolb: That’s okay, don’t worry about it.
Mr. Bays: That don’t bother you?
Mr. Kolb: No that’s okay, you’ve got some good stories here; that’s what’s important.
Mr. Bays: Well, and another one that I remember, now this is some years later, I went to Las Vegas on a meeting, and the other AEC contractors at that time had representatives there. We met there in Caesar’s Palace four or five days, and while we were there, the guy that was over at that operation there arranged for us to go out to the Nevada Test Site, which I, and –
Mr. Kolb: The Trinity Test Site?
[Editor’s note: The Nevada Test Site is not the Trinity Site. The Trinity Site is in the state of New Mexico.]
Mr. Bays: Yeah, and we went – one thing I remember, the first thing, I guess, is when we went to a mine, it was just a big sixty feet opening in the hard rock and the army was actually doing this and we had a lady in the crowd and they wouldn’t let her go in. They were superstitious, the workers were, and she had to sit in a trailer with some army officer while we all made the tour down. But as you went down – and we rode in a little train, I think – there was things running off of the main –
Mr. Kolb: This is in the rock?
Mr. Bays: In the rock.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mr. Bays: As you went down you’d run into these – and I was told later that we could put an explosion into each one of those things going off, and I guess we went back four or five miles or more into that. It was real interesting.
Mr. Kolb: So they were tunneling by using conventional explosives?
Mr. Bays: No. They were using drills and things of that kind, but they had these mines running off from the main entrance as you went down through it. They could close these off, set their explosion in there, and –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, nuclear testing.
Mr. Bays: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I see what you mean, underground testing.
Mr. Bays: Underground testing.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, which went on for many years.
Mr. Bays: Then they took us to another, is this of interest?
Mr. Kolb: Sure.
Mr. Bays: They took us to another one, and I was fortunate I got to be ��� there was [four] of us as operators, and what we were doing, we were looking at a video they had made of an explosion, and we could operate that video and see how that explosion went. But I can remember that they had a big tower and then they moved it on a rail away from where the explosion was going to be, and you could just see the ground. Then we went out to another spot, and this was rather interesting too. We did what – called the Plowshare Program, are you familiar with it?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, that’s nuclear –
Mr. Bays: Explosion.
Mr. Kolb: Explosion, right.
Mr. Bays: They were trying to develop the least amount of radioactive would come from the explosion, and there was a sign says, “Plowshare Program,” and that really made me interested ’cause I knew we were doing it in Y-12, and there was a tremendous crater out in the desert there.
Mr. Kolb: How was Y-12 involved?
Mr. Bays: They were making the explosion somewhere or parts of it.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, parts, yeah.
Mr. Bays: I guess a lot of people –
Mr. Kolb: So you’d heard the word ‘Plowshare’ and –
Mr. Bays: And the program, yeah. Every month they would [have] a production meeting and there was one that represented the departments and that’s the way I learned about it and learned a lot of the stuff that’s going on in the plant. Another thing that a lot of people, I don’t think, are aware of, but they were making shells that could be shot in a cannon or a big gun. Were you familiar with that?
Mr. Kolb: You mean, nuclear, for nuclear explosions?
Mr. Bays: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Well, we developed that technology. I don’t think we ever used it.
Mr. Bays: I don’t know whether they ever did there or not.
Mr. Kolb: But I know that the U.S. – so Y-12 was involved in that too?
Mr. Bays: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Very, very small, and I’m sure they tested it probably out there.
Mr. Bays: I think they did, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Where they could use so much space they could just –
Mr. Bays: Over the years I was very fortunate to go to Los Alamos and Amarillo, Hanford, Kansas City, to all of those places, but the best one of all of them, right here! We just got back from Louisiana and this is like heaven here.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, you’re right. I have a daughter down in Richland, so we go out – I’d never been to Richland before that, Hanford you know, and learning more about it, ��cause I’d heard about it. And my son-in-law is an engineer. He’s working on the clean-up out there, and apparently they had so much land, they didn’t worry about contaminating the land, they just, back during WORLD WAR II, they just couldn’t worry about it, and now they’ve got to worry about it.
Mr. Bays: Well another thing that I remember, they would take a machine to a big lathe or drill or something, and when it got highly contaminated, they would take them down and bury them, the whole thing.
Mr. Kolb: The whole thing?
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Not just the bit that was contaminated; they take the whole thing.
Mr. Bays: No, the whole thing. See, the one on the ship really set off a lot of things in the plant.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mr. Bays: Then they finally decided, look, if we break even, we will decontaminate them, we’ll take all the paint off, decontaminate them, and then we can send them out to the GSA or whoever wants them. But I can remember going down through there, and the big machine sitting down there, getting ready to cover them up.
Mr. Kolb: In a big landfill?
Mr. Bays: Yeah, there was a big landfill where practically all – just west of Y-12, and they buried a lot of stuff down there. I don’t know whether they’ve ever dug it up or not.
Mr. Kolb: I was just going to ask, I wonder if that’s ever been, probably back then they didn’t line the landfills like they do now to keep the water from getting in, but they may have had to go back.
Mr. Bays: I’ve had a lot of people to call me about that and ask me questions about the location, what I thought went in those.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, ’cause you had to release it, too.
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: You were the last person to sign the release, your name went everywhere.
Mr. Bays: Oh, I tell you what I’d like to have, the requisitions that I have written approving the purchase of material. The lotteries would be small money compared to what I have signed for.
[break in recording]
Mr. Bays: Since you mentioned, there was a lot of what we called tails, that was the code name for lithium deuteride, and lithium that we used in Y-12, and we stored, we filled K-25 up with that stuff, 55-gallon drum, and also up at Paducah, and I don’t know what ever happened to it. And we had to re-drum all of it ’cause the paper, the cardboard type of, just would begin to really deteriorate, so we had to send people down.
Mr. Kolb: What form was this, these tails?
Mr. Bays: In a powder.
Mr. Kolb: Powder, okay.
Mr. Bays: But they sure did deteriorate awful fast and I had to send people up to Paducah to take – and we donated a lot of it to various places.
Mr. Kolb: It has some use in chemical engineering or something?
Mr. Bays: I’m sure, yeah, I’m sure.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah.
Mr. Bays: It was called lithium or tails after it had been used. But when we put it in, it was lithium deuteride. And I think they sorted parts, if I’m not mistaken, the part of the first lithium –
[Side B]
Mr. Kolb: This being a secret town and a guarded town, [did] that bother you at all in any way, all the guards and the fact that it was closed off?
Mr. Bays: No, it really didn’t. I just accepted it was some form of a government operation and [that’s what] they are, but no I sure didn’t. I didn’t know what they were making, but it didn’t bother me at all. I just got up and went to work every day, seven days a week practically.
Mr. Kolb: And when they finally wanted to get rid of the gates and open the town, that was a problem for some people I understand, right?
Mr. Bays: There was, yeah, there sure was. But it wasn’t to me. I remember they brought Rod Cameron.
Mr. Kolb: The ceremony, the movie stars that they brought in.
Mr. Bays: And one of the movie stars, I can’t remember her name. Good looking girl.
Mr. Kolb: There was one glamorous blonde.
Mr. Bays: Yeah, you’re right. And then there was a cowboy, a guy who was a cowboy. And when they all went to dinner down at the Grove Center place, I don’t know who it was – one of them got just drunk. They had to take him to his, up at the –
Mr. Kolb: Got too much Tennessee liquor or whatever. That was a big day, I guess, when they had the big parade and everything.
Mr. Bays: Yes, it was.
Mr. Kolb: But I understand they had a referendum before that to ask people to vote on whether they wanted to open the gates or not, and do you remember that?
Mr. Bays: I remember voting, yeah, but I don’t remember whether it was before or after they opened the gates.
Mr. Kolb: Well it must have been before because I understand it failed and –
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: And they came back and they did it anyways.
Mr. Bays: I can remember when the hospital up here was called Oak Ridge Hospital, and if I’m not mistaken, they almost give that to the Methodist Medical, it may have been some money, but I –
Mr. Kolb: Well, originally, yeah, the Methodist Medical got the hospital. I’m trying to remember if that was the original building or whether they built a new building.
Mr. Bays: Well they did build a new building. It’s the one they have now.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, the original building stayed with that team –
Mr. Bays: ORINS.
Mr. Kolb: The team that did the nuclear response stuff, REAC/TS, they call it now.
Mr. Bays: And OR, let’s see, Oak Ridge –
Mr. Kolb: ORAU?
Mr. Bays: No.
Mr. Kolb: ORINS?
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: O-R-I-N-S, ORINS?
Mr. Bays: Yes, they had some people in there. There was a lot of people that they experimented on there for cancer.
Mr. Kolb: For cancer, right, they had a program there that got to be very controversial in some cases.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Where were you the day the bomb dropped and the news of the atomic project got out? How did you hear about it? Were you at work?
Mr. Bays: I was at work, and a guy’s wife called, one of the guys who worked for me, and he come running into my office and told me about it.
Mr. Kolb: Was it put on the p.a. or anything like that?
Mr. Bays: Later it was, but he told me – his wife, now – and there was another –yes, oh, when Kennedy was assassinated.
Mr. Kolb: Oh yeah.
Mr. Bays: I was at work then, and this same guy came and told me about that. And the same way, his wife called him, too.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, heard about it at home.
Mr. Bays: And called him.
Mr. Kolb: So they heard about it on the national radio first, and it spread to the –
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Okay. Didn’t come through official channels, however.
Mr. Bays: No.
Mr. Kolb: Course once it got out, it spread like wild fire, I’m sure. And wasn’t there a big party in town that night or soon after?
Mr. Bays: I don’t recall. That could have been but I –
Mr. Kolb: You know Ed Westcott took a picture of Jackson Square being filled with people, and a sign WAR ENDS, and looking down at the people partying or having a big turnout in Jackson Square.
Mr. Bays: Now there is about that same time, a picture of people walking out of – you ever seen that one?
Mr. Kolb: Of Y-12?
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Was it a lot of women, women and men both?
Mr. Bays: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Yes.
Mr. Bays: There was a guy in that picture that worked for me.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mr. Bays: I remember that very much.
Mr. Kolb: He’s an interesting fellow. Ed Westcott’s had a stroke.
Mr. Bays: Is he still living?
Mr. Kolb: Oh yeah, oh yeah, he’s in his, probably about 83 or so now. He had a stroke about two years ago. He can’t talk very plainly. He can hear and understand, but he can’t speak very well, so he’s a little bit handicapped that way. I think he can drive a car now. He’s had some paralysis problems but –
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Go ahead.
Mr. Bays: I worked actually for an ensign, and I believe that all the navy officers were officers not, you know, just where I am, and I can’t remember –
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Manford, a few more kind of off-the-wall questions here I’ve got for you, but did you have any contact with any Afro-Americans when you here in WORLD WAR II days? They were here of course.
Mr. Bays: Yes, they were laborers out at the plants. That’s the only contact that I had with them.
Mr. Kolb: Mostly at the plant.
Mr. Bays: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: The fact they were isolated in town, you didn’t have much contact, normal kind of thing here, but they were here. Okay, we talked about the city gates opening and you were here then. Well, what do you think about Oak Ridge as a community that came out of this crazy wartime situation, how it’s evolved over the years?
Mr. Bays: I just made a trip to Louisiana, stayed down there for a week and we got back, you know, while you went – anyhow –
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, this was a vacation trip kind of?
Mr. Bays: And you talk about really appreciating Oak Ridge, every time I go to Louisiana I just think the world of this place. It is home to me. I’ve growed up here. I was only 19 years old, I think, when I went to work here.
Mr. Kolb: Oh I forgot to ask you, you were 19 years old, okay.
Mr. Bays: Yeah and East Tennessee, Oak Ridge, all this is – people that have lived here are very lucky to experience what they’ve experienced in this town. I am really sold on it, I am. We never look out-of-town for a house to buy or get out of Oak Ridge. The facilities are so available, the hospital, we can see it from here, off [inaudible], some years ago, five or six years, my wife had a hip operation. Two or three days later, when she got home, she woke up in the morning and said I can’t breathe. And so I called the people out, and they thought she was having a heart attack, but I told them I don’t think so. And when we finally got her to hospital they determined she had a blood clot from the operation, and if we hadn’t lived this close to that place, she’d be dead. That’s one reason we like Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Well, a lot of people move from out of town into town for that reason too, because they want to be close to the medical facilities.
Mr. Bays: And I personally think that we’ve got some of the best doctors around. I’ve had two bypasses, one of three, one of four, and Dr. Lawson is my cardiologist. I think the world of him. I was a diabetic. Bunick was my doctor there; I see her once a year. So we are just blessed to have doctors that we have in the town. Our services are all good.
Mr. Kolb: Right. It’s not a cheap place to live.
Mr. Bays: No it isn’t.
Mr. Kolb: But it’s good.
Mr. Bays: It’s good.
Mr. Kolb: You get what you pay for; you don’t pay for nothing, you ain’t going to get nothing, either, right?
Mr. Bays: That’s right. And I don’t ever think about moving out of the town. Never have since I’ve been here.
Mr. Kolb: You’re right. Everyone I talk to says the same thing, basically. Of course, Hanford was totally different because it was like a paper town. They had built it so fast and then it decayed and then had to build it over again for the Cold War period. There are a lot of the same things out there, same kind of houses, and I’m sure they had a lot of similar experiences.
Mr. Bays: Yeah, I’ve visited Hanford.
Mr. Kolb: But it’s not, the climate is not nearly like ours. I mean, it’s hot and it’s dry and then it gets cold. And then they don’t have the rainfall that we do, so it’s just different. And I don’t know much about Los Alamos. I’m sure it’s a pretty area, but it’s pretty remote too.
Mr. Bays: Yeah, it is. It’s out from Amarillo.
Mr. Kolb: But as far as the three sites, this has got everything beat.
Mr. Bays: I think so.
Mr. Kolb: And I guess I’m glad that Grove decided not to build all those big reactors right in the middle of this reservation; we’d have so much contamination around it, it would have been horrible.
Mr. Bays: I saw something recently where I think Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and, I think, Hanford is still running, but there’s not over six or seven, there’re less contractors now.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, they narrowed it way down.
Mr. Bays: It’s a way, way –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Bays: Yeah, we had place in Kansas City, right there. Is the one in Portsmouth still running? I guess it is.
Mr. Kolb: No that’s private now, private company, U.S. Enrichment has bought all that. Yeah, that’s all privatized.
Mr. Bays: There used to be an outfit in St. Louis.
Mr. Kolb: Mallencott?
Mr. Bays: Yeah, that’s who it was.
Mr. Kolb: Chemical?
Mr. Bays: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Well they were like a contractor or something during the war, yeah. They were working on the uranium.
Mr. Bays: Then there was a Silas Mason Hanger located down in the Midwest and I think they were in the storage facilities at that time.
Mr. Kolb: Well during the war, WORLD WAR II, I mean, there were thousands of companies working on this, literally thousands.
Mr. Bays: A lot of people don’t realize that.
Mr. Kolb: I mean, little, big, you just name it, it was a huge – I mean, not just all these secret cities, but all this stuff going on all over the country feeding into the system for whatever they did. It was gargantuan management.
Mr. Bays: I think over the years, as a whole, we’ve had terrific managers of the Y-12 plant. Hibbs was a terrific manager.
Mr. Kolb: Case was good too, as I understand it.
Mr. Bays: Yeah, I liked Murray, but I just happened to agree with him.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, Clark Center, I guess, was very –
Mr. Bays: He was a very nice guy too.
Mr. Kolb: He’s doing oral histories, too, on his own.
Mr. Bays: Is that right?
Mr. Kolb: Of people that he knew back there.
Mr. Bays: Where does he live now?
Mr. Kolb: I guess he’s up in New York, up in the Northeast maybe, New York somewhere, I’m not sure, but that’s my impression I have. I guess he’s still alive too. He would be way up there if he is. I’m sure we would have known if he passed away ’cause his name is very prominent down here. Well, Manford, I think that will do it.
Mr. Bays: Okay.
Mr. Kolb: Anything else you want to ���
Mr. Bays: That’s all that I can think of.
Mr. Kolb: – throw in the pot?
Mr. Bays: When you get home, I’ll –
Mr. Kolb: Well, okay.
[end of recording]